Monday, April 24, 2006

Hu knows what they're up to

The WSWS has an interesting article about The Hu's recent American tour and the multiple snubs the Bushies gave to their loan shark and labor pimp. They then look at the deeper issues and dangers:

The danger of a military conflict between the United States and China, with all its potentially cataclysmic consequences, does not arise out of the personalities of Bush or Hu, but out of deep-going objective contradictions. The same economic forces that have produced an ever-greater integration of the US and Chinese economies--perhaps the highest expression of the overall globalization of the world economy--lead inevitably to conflicts between these two powers over access to natural resources, control of key strategic positions and, ultimately, world power.

From the early 1980s, the major imperialist powers--the US, Japan, the European powers--have poured capital into China, building China up as an offshore manufacturing platform that plays a decisive role in their class strategy, allowing them to put unrelenting pressure on labor costs and generating super-profits. The growth of world capitalism over the past quarter century is largely bound up with the opening up of China.

But this same process has generated a challenge to US domination of the Asia-Pacific region. The growing industrial and financial might of China increases its strategic weight in world affairs and makes possible a more ambitious program of armament, diplomacy and cultivation of economic ties. US imperialism reacts to China's rise as a threat to its hegemony all along the eastern shore of Asia, as well as in the Indian Ocean and even in Africa and South America.

For all the ritualistic invocations of democracy by American politicians, the US-China conflict has nothing to do with any repressive actions on the part of the Stalinist dictatorship in Beijing. On the contrary, maintenance of China as an almost inexhaustible supplier of cheap labor for international capital requires an internal political regime that denies workers any democratic rights and suppresses all opposition to the most brutal sweatshop methods.

Corporate America relies on the Beijing dictatorship to police and suppress the Chinese workers as well as to provide an increasingly important market for the sale of US goods.

It's insane. The world is being run like one of those slick Hollywood triple-cross movies like Intolerable Cruelty, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, or Mr. and Mrs. Smith. In "Confessions," there's a scene near the end where Sam Rockwell and Julia Roberts have a pleasant tea together, each one trying to poison the other. In "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" Brad and Angelina return home for dinner together after having tried to kill each other. They walk around the kitchen, chatting pleasantly in double-entendres ("I missed you." "I missed you too."), while every action is loaded with veiled threat. Pretty tame stuff in a world where the neocons build up Israel in part because a warped interpretation of biblical prophecy suggests that Israel must rule the Middle East before being destroyed at Armageddon, and where the US helps China grow into an economic powerhouse in order to destroy the labor movement, all the while planning to destroy China once it gets too powerful (and labor is fully destroyed)--and with Israel and China fully aware of exactly what our neonuts are up to.